Social media and the effective use of video on these channels offer an opportunity that no marketer should miss when it comes to increasing reach and brand awareness. They are an important part of a well-thought-out video marketing strategy. Nevertheless, I often get questions about developing a strategy in which the videos posted on social media are aligned with the videos on the company’s own infrastructure. Below, I’ll share some tips on how the videos should complement each other and how you can create video content for social media that brings users back to your websites.
The marketing tool “social media” can be thought of as a fishing net. You have to cast the net as widely as possible to get the biggest catch. You can and should establish a presence on the social channels where your prospects are. But ultimately, the goal is to drive traffic back to your own website, where you can control the user experience, capture better analytics, convert prospects into customers, and retain customers over the long term.
Social channels demand a different type of video content, such as short video snippets, partial stories or live event highlights, that piques viewers’ interest and draws them to your site to find out more. Think of these videos as trailers for your actual video content, to supplement your other video content. In fact, creating content for social media marketing is easier than you might think, and it is a supporting activity rather than a separate one.
Let’s look at some specific ways to create this content. I know the challenges associated with creating additional videos from my own experience. As a Brightcove customer, I initially avoided creating social media content because my primary content was quite time consuming and costly. However, when I looked into it more deeply, I realized that the additional effort was limited. I also discovered tricks that made it easier to create social media content and made it an effective tool for driving traffic back to my websites. In the end, social media content proved to be an extremely worthwhile investment.
Today, you should learn one thing above all: the biggest trick is to plan for these additional video pieces from the outset. When planning a shoot, writing a script and before the actual shooting, you should decide what these additional videos should look like. I’ve found that once you have cameras, lights, and actors on set, it takes very little extra effort to shoot another version of the video for social media. This is where we usually fall down. We think about social media marketing after the fact, and then we have to rush something together at the last minute, which rarely yields effective content.
The same applies to editing a trailer or a shortened version of a video. You may be surprised how happy the editor will be to create a short version of the finished piece. In fact, 90% of the work is already done, and with a little extra effort, two versions of the same video can be edited and created.
Another great way to create marketing content is to have someone on set shooting behind-the-scenes footage. This includes bloopers, outtakes, shots of camera equipment and crew, or scenes that tell part of the story and pique viewers’ interest to see the finished video.
One of my favorite ways to create social marketing videos is to capture live event streams. The Brightcove Live module has a built-in editor that you can use to mark edit points in the long-form version of your video. You can then save small partial clips directly to your Video Cloud account. These can then be easily posted directly to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. from your account. If you know how you want to use recordings, you can take care during the live event, make notes on interesting events in the live stream, and quickly and easily create videos for social media afterwards.
Hopefully you’ve noticed that the common thread in all these scenarios is planning ahead. Video production pros know that the time they invest in pre-production yields two or three times that amount in the end because there are fewer problems to fix. The same is true when developing the social media portion of your video marketing strategy. Even minimal planning in advance saves you a lot of work later. This way, you can effortlessly create and syndicate compelling content for social channels that advances your business goals.
